Breathing
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TheAncientMysterySchools
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ConceptualTyranny(283)

Two questions here. Now
the first one is quite an important one.

Do
we have a special breathing method in connection with the exercise
given last week?

We will deal with that
one first.

When we are breathing,
we do not suck air into the lungs from the air, we do not take energy
from the air but you have energy inside you which has imposed itself
on the breathing apparatus — so that the rhythm of your
breathing is evidence of an energy being used. And if you try to hold
your breath, stop breathing altogether, you will find a peculiar
imperativeness in the breathing centre. So if you with your conscious
mind try to inhibit breathing you will discover there is another
level of being of which you are not normally conscious but which
insists on breathing.

So we would be better
to make sure about that now, won’t take long, won’t take
more than a couple of minutes for the best of us. Let’s all
hold our breath. Just breathe in, hold your breath and try to the
best of your ability not to breath again, and in the process watch in
your body where the impulse to breathe starts from. All take a
breath, hold it and be determined that you are not going to release
it. You can watch in your body while you are holding your breath to
see where the imperative to breathe comes from… ……
………

… ……….what
centre did you find?. You all agree it is somewhere near here? Now
there is a centre there where energy is coming in and your conscious
mind has a job to defeat it. It is actually possible if you are
really obstinate about it, to deprive yourself of oxygen and faint.
Some of the Everest men did it as an exercise. But when you do so it
starts up again. So even when you are unconscious it carries on and
when you try with your consciousness to fight it, it is a very, very
hard fight and is centred somewhere here. Now that shows you that
there is a non-individuated energy that is not connected necessarily
with that part of your being which you conceptualise as yourself.

So there is a breathing
rhythm in us which is deeper, more imperative than the conscious
individuality of an ordinary man. It can be defeated by a man if he
integrates himself to a high degree, but when he has defeated it and
fallen unconscious, then it starts up again. Which shows again that
it is a separate centre of being.

Now, you often hear
references in mystical literature to a kind of breathing called soul
breathing. Breathing with soul instead of breathing with the
atmospheric air. And this breathing is connected with the magical
processes which we were discussing last week. If you find the centre
in your physical body where the breathing imperative manifests, and
you deliberately cut it down to the minimum, at a certain level of
repression of this you will find a tendency to imagine a breathing
process going on — you believe you are imagining it —
which in actual physical fact is not going on.

In other words your
imaginative breathing is deeper than your physical breathing. Now
this breathing if it is truly imaginative in our sense, if the MAG in
imaginative means the will, is what we want to get at. Because it
affects the whole psyche.

Now, the breath rate of
an average person is fairly rapid and varies a lot according to the
emotional condition but the breath rate to be aimed at is that
physical rate of breathing which corresponds exactly with the proper
rate of the soul breathing.

We know, if we take the
three part man, somewhere over there coming in is the imperative of
breathing. We know there is an energy which is contracting here and
then expanding again, somewhere centred there, and that this energy
is a field state. There is actually an expansion and a contraction of
a field energy which is the cause of the motion of the lungs. The air
doesn’t move the lungs, but the lungs are moved by this force
and the result is that the air enters the lungs.

So if we try to inhibit
breathing, we are really trying to control this field. Now when we
define the exercise of inhibiting breathing, in the fact of defining
it, we cannot hear. We have a concept of breathing and
a concept of interference. When we try to impose upon this centre
which is connected with our life, with the thinking centre which is
derived from the five sense percepts — adding up into a concept
of individuality, to try to break this rhythm is to call upon
energies here which are not normally resident in a man. We have to
pile energies into our conceptual structure to a very high degree
before we can actually hold the breath for more than a couple of
minutes. To extend your held breath to three minutes, to three and a
half, to four requires a terrific amount of integration in there,
because you have to impose a concept on a fundamental impulse.

If we get used to this
feeling of breathing, its imperativeness, and watch it compared with
the concept and then bring the conceptual rate of breathing in line
with the psychic breathing, we can then discover that if that
represents an individual and this represents the macrocosmos sphere
outside it, we can bring the individual into phase with the solar
rhythm.

So we have a means of
bringing ourselves into phase, into harmony with solar rhythms
through the breathing centre, and in general we can say that the
breath rate is slower there than the average breath.

Let’s count our
own breath. Just mentally breath in and out as usual and count in
terms of seconds. Count one and two, put an and in
between and then you won’t skip. One and two and see how many
you breath in and out………...

………..Two
in and three out………

……….Two
in and three out is not a bad rhythm, for average functions. But now
do it again but this time watch your emotional condition. Just do
that for thirty seconds.

I
felt that my breathing was changing

Yes, well you would
start interfering with it unconsciously. Just deliberately now,
breath in two seconds and out two seconds and watch your
feeling…………………….

Now change the rate to
four in and four out and watch the difference in your feeling level
…. …. …. … …. ….
…..

It
seems to have tightened up a bit.

Tightened up a bit.
Let’s use another word for it. You have got a sense that you
are controlling it.

That
you make an effort.

You’re making an
effort. That effort is control. A constriction deliberately done is
control. Now your emotional state when you breathe slowly is that
way, if you hold it, puts you in contact with volition. If you allow
your breathing to go, it will vary according to the ideas flying
through your mind which induce emotional states which affect the
breathing and make it variable. If you want to stabilise your
emotions, you deliberately regularise your breathing and you will
notice a very peculiar thing about it. That if you breathe slowly,
four in and four out, you will feel your temperature rising.

Did anybody notice
that? Now why is that? Because you would expect the opposite to
happen, wouldn’t you? You would think that if you breathed
more, that your temperature would become higher, wouldn’t you?
Yet the fact is that you feel yourself getting warm when you breathe
slower. Why is that?

You
are doing more muscular work holding your breath?

You are doing more
muscular work holding it. Now that work is introverted work, and you
are curving energies back on yourself in so doing.

Now you might have
heard of a famous Irish hero who when he fought got so hot that there
was a great aura of heat around him and he glowed with a horrible
heat and terrified his enemies. Now this is very similar to the kind
of breathing we are talking about. In his day, it was customary for
men called heroes deliberately to make the breathing very, very slow,
because the amount of energy held in to make it slow heats the body
up to such a pitch, that it can strike very much more strongly than
in ordinary shallow breathing.

Now let’s
remember if we take a diagram of the solar system and a diameter
through it which we would represent ideally as a simple circle
without any distortions. In the actual solar system there is a long
axis and a short, but we will calculate the variation between the
long one and the short from the distortions of the circle and say
that there is a rhythm running through here as we go round the solar
system on the earth, and a sub-division of this impulse down to a
certain limit constitutes an in-breath and an out-breath for ahuman being.

Now in the solar system
that is practically a constant. There is a solar rhythm. If we allow
ourselves to become excited by external stimuli, the rhythm that we
get is imposed upon us by accident, that is, by no necessity of inner
being.

So if you suddenly
shout at a child, and make the child jump, you have imposed upon it
an accidental rhythm. A rhythm non-essential to the child. If all
accidental rhythms are removed then your breath rate will be a
partial, a harmonic, of the solar rhythm and if it is such a partial
then you will become progressively more and more conscious of the
solar being.

Now it is resident in
its centre in that group of nerves, that cluster that we would call
the solar plexus. It is here that this imperative flows through. Not
through the structure as a gross material structure, but through the
subtle structure which corresponds with it. So if we find that solar
rhythm in ourselves which we do by slowing our breathing down until
it has become volitional, we can by increasing sensitivity find the
rhythm in us which corresponds exactly with the solar rhythm. Then we
must be fed by solar energy and it is our aim to become solar in
rhythm rather than lunar.

The moon rhythms vary
much more than the solar rhythms and if we go on the lunar rhythms we
will be more subject to variations in our psychic processes. Hence,
‘swear not by the inconstant moon.1’
So we have to aim at a kind of breathing which will put us in contact
with this solar breathing. Behind the solar breathing there is a
sidereal breathing and behind that the breathing of the Absolute. And
it is a definite process of breathing just as much as this physical
intake of air.

There is an intake into
the macrocosmos of energy and an expulsion of that energy from it,
just as in the same way a certain kind of jellyfish in the sea
expands and water goes in and it contracts and water goes out —
there is a rhythm there. So every being from the macrocosmic being
down has a peculiar rhythm to do with energy intake and energy
expenditure and therefore there is a proper cosmic rhythm. If we find
that rhythm in our selves, a harmonic of the solar rhythm, of the
sidereal rhythm, the absolute, then we are finding that in us which
will harmonise the whole being. Because the essential of unity is
that there must be a proper place for each partial activity within
us. It’s this harmonic process which is going to harmonise the
body.

I believe that Mr.
Watson is going to bring his bass down next week, when he will show
you what harmonics are, and their relations.

When you get used to
the idea that there is a proper breathing for you when you are in a
calm state, and that the restatement of that breathing will always
restate the conditions of the psyche in calmness, then you will
deliberately cultivate that breathing alone which can give you the
condition that you want. Because if you allow shallow, irregular
breathing, you cannot control yourself. Hence the importance in yoga
of breathing exercises.

Now in yoga they have a
ratio of 1 : 4 : 2 for breathing. If you inhale for one unit, you
hold for four and exhale two. So if you inhale four, hold sixteen,
exhale eight (in seconds). You keep that ratio and that ratio forces
you to become volitional. It isn’t a ratio that you can do
accidentally. So it is really calling upon your volitional centre
when you keep to that ratio, hence the great stress upon it. You
cannot make that ratio accidentally. It forces you onto your
volitional centre and if you become progressively more aware of the
centre where the breathing impulse comes in, when you are applying
that ratio, at a certain point you will feel that the thing is
fighting, that the rhythm is fighting all that you call your
individual tendencies.

If it wins you have
gained your end. If that rhythm dominates the individual one, you
have gained your armoury.

If the individual one
destroys that ratio then you will lapse into individual
perturbability. Remember that 1-4-2 ratio because its very important
because it forces you onto a volitional level. So you can see if you
were to step that up to 16 this becomes quite big. It doesn’t
matter in advanced breathing exercises how long you try to do it if
you keep that ratio. If you keep the ratio with only one second in,
four held and two out, it will still force you onto the volitional
centre. It is not an exercise you can do unconsciously.

Now in ordinary
breathing exercises you can breathe in and out and in and out, and
forget you are doing it. So it is not necessarily a volitional
exercise. And all the exercises to do with magical development have
to be volitional. So a device that forces you onto your volitional
centre is needed in the initial stages. And this ratio is such a
device.

It affects the body in
a peculiar way, and cannot be done accidentally.

So about the breathing
we will say that every centre you have is breathing at a certain
rate, so this lower one here in taking energy in and then letting
energy out, has a rhythm which could be called breathing. It is
in-taking and exhaling. The same thing with the lungs and the same
thing with the head. This rhythm of waking and sleeping has to do
with certain centres up here and centre here and here harmonise with
it.

So of breathing we have
to find our proper centre, deliberately interfere with it so that we
can locate it by its reaction, and then stabilise the rhythms of it
so that we can discover the solar rhythm and first of all use a very,
very simple one, four in and four out and hold it, four in and four
out in order to make sure that we know where that centre is. When you
have it perfectly clear in your mind, then go onto the 1-4-2 ratio
and hold it and test yourself. Now whatever phenomena should appear
in your mind, they themselves are not magical. When you get on to the
level of the field change, you will experience something totally
different. If you don’t ignore the first manifestation, like
occasional flashes, if you don’t ignore those, then you will
not get on to a higher level because you will become delighted and
involved with what in effect is really a physiological manifestation.

Ancient Mystery Schools

I think that’s
enough about the breathing for the time being. There’s a
question here about the ancient mystery schools such as Pythagoras
and so on……

Could
it be said that they were magical schools in the sense that we
understand them?

MU (pronounced mú)

Issue

Tora - law
- integration

M

YS

TER

Y

MA

G

IK

We can say that all the ancient mystery schools were magical
in the sense we defined last week. We will take the word mystery now,
and show the relation between this and magik. This first letter the
Greek letter is really pronounced ‘MÚ’ and has to
do with the letter for urge and the letter for precision,
simultaneously. Here is the Tora again, here is the issue, so the
substantial urge point, ‘U’ urge point ‘U’
issue producing the tor, ter, earth, integration. Now compare that
with the magikal process. Then this becomes to G and integration
becomes the IK.

Mystery — The law
integration by means of the issue of the substantial urge form.

En

Theo

si

asm

In

the
God

this
function

has established itself

So the mysteries were actually ritual processes for inducing
levels of consciousness not accessible to the ordinary five-sense
mind. You remember we mentioned the exaltation of the will, that you
have to lift the will up deliberately by using the will on itself.
You must elevate it by a process of internal self-exciting. This is
called the exaltation of the will. The will has to be lifted up into
a state of enthusiasm. Now enthusiasm itself is a word that means,
‘god has come into me’. So to be enthusiastic is to be
working in the manner of a divine being. Now the difference between
an average person and a divine person is enthusiasm. That is to say,
the average man has enthusiasm for nothing. He has nothing in himself
that works continuously towards an end. A stimulus from outside
produces a reaction. But he has no principle inside himself of
continuous application. So he is not enthusiastic. He has no divine
impulse in him.

So when we are talking
about the mysteries, we are talking about those processes into which
men were initiated, processes of the law which understood led to the
integration of a man when he applied onto his own substantial urge
and form these principles, and working upon himself produced an
issue.

So that if we say the
old form Mu and Me are telescoped together, this is the substantial
urge, this is substantial form, and both of these result in an issue.
That issue is illumination. And it depends on the exaltation of the
will. Now there are two aspects here, the urge and the form in the
urge. To exalt the will, you have to take the urge and apply it to
the form and you must clarify the form with the power of the urge.
You must will that the thing be important and then with your will,
you must penetrate into the thing to make it important. It’s
entirely an act of will. There need not be any importance in the
thing itself to begin with, you are going to import into it. Remember
importance means in-carried. Import: in carry. There are no
importances in the universe other than those things into which man
imports his will. So whatever you have defined as important in your
life is merely defined as that into which you have willed. So all the
different importances of different people are simply the different
directions of their will.

So we have to take an idea. Let us take the idea of the
identity of the individual with the universal. There’s the
individual, and there’s the universal. We are going to assert
that this is identical with that. And we are going to do it
magically. So we say, we’ve drawn a tiny little circle there,
and there’s a little hole in it because if we remember rotating
force cannot go to the dead centre becaue it would stop. So it goes
near to it and then it flies out again to the limit and flies back
again, continuously.

So the inner circle
that looks like a dot is really a little circle. It is identical with
the big one, in the sense that it has exactly the same form, is
centred, it is concentric with it, it is not eccentric, it has a
common centre, and the rhythm of one and of the other is
correspondent. So we have defined it. The macrocosmos and the little
perimeter of my being, the form of it is what my eye sees and I’ve
put my will into it. I now will that this little being, this little
circle shall breathe as from the macrocosmic level. If I deliberately
do this I will induce in myself a very rapid increase in temperature,
and that increase in temperature purges the body. It is actually like
the process of detoxification to do it. The farther out I think that
macrocosmic circle is, the slower my breathing will become.

Actually do this as an
exercise now.

Take your own physical
bodies as represented by that little circle, and let this other
circle represent the walls of the room to begin with. Now just
breathe out to the walls of the room, and then back again, out to the
walls of the room and back again. Do that for a few seconds, and
notice the level of your attention and the amount of will that you
need to do it… … … … … … …

… … …
now compare that with this other one. You now have an idea of
Liverpool in your mind. Now breathe to the limits of Liverpool and
back again. And notice the change in your feeling content .. …
… … … … …

.. … … ..
When you have got the feeling of Liverpool compared with the first
one, now extend the breathing to cover the whole of Great Britain.
Deliberately take the breathing as far as it takes you and as long as
it takes you in time, to imagine the extent of Britain, breathe out
that far and then back again.. … … …

… … …
when you’ve got that breathing now breathe out to include the
whole terrestrial globe and back again… … … …
notice the qualitative change in your feeling. .. .. .. ..

… … …
… now breathe out beyond the terrestrial globe to the limits
of the solar system. … … … … in again …
… … …

… … …
notice the feeling and then change that into breathing right out to
the limits of the sidereal system, the farthest stars in a big sphere
round you. … … … …

… … …
Have you all felt the difference in feeling between those levels? And
the different measures of breathing? Did you notice what it was?

Progressively
deeper.

Progressively deeper.
Now this is tremendously important, because when you conceptualise a
thing like this, and deliberately import your will into it, and you
will into the imagination so that as you are extending your spatial
concept your rhythm is becoming slower and deeper. So you are
bringing yourself into phase with these other rhythms, solar and
sidereal.

Now try this little
experiment. I want you to imagine this sidereal sphere and to get to
it I want you to imagine the room, Liverpool, we’ll skip Great
Britain, go straight to the globe, and the solar system and back
again. And try to force the transition into one second, both ways and
see what happens. You’ve got to get the imagination to fly to
all those phases and back again in one second and see what happens. …
… … …

… … …
…. What do you find out?

I
got confused

Did you get confused?

Agitation

Did anybody not get
confused? Now this tells you a peculiar thing about yourself. It
actually takes time to imagine spatial distances. So that if you take
a long distance like the distance from here to one of the outer
stars, it will take you a definite time to get there and back in your
own imagination. And if you deliberately regulate the breathing to
this imagination, you have a mode of magical harmonising with their
correspondent being levels.

Now you will notice
that if you deliberately breathe, I want you all now to —
you’ll have do this privately — imagine some emotional
situation that you have not liked in the past, in relation to some
specific situation very small, watch your breathing rate while you
are doing it, deliberately select it, something as unpleasant as you
can find in as small a situation as you can find and watch your
breathing… … … …

… … …
… Now when you’ve found it, suddenly shift your
imagination right through the terrestrial, the solar, the sidereal,
and feel the change that occurs… … … … …
…

Id

en

It

entity

… … … … Now imagine that
sidereal sphere, way beyond the limits of the solar sphere, put your
mind in it and breathe at the rate that you have to breathe for that
and then try to see if you can see any importance in that previous
unpleasant situation, whilst you are at the same time breathing the
very slow breath that belongs to the sidereal sphere. See if you can
actually do it… … … …… … …
… If you do this properly you will have the key to the effects
of identification…

… … … … What do you find?

I
find it very distant to get hold of it.

Actually, you find that
it’s practically impossible to do both at once, don’t
you? So that you cannot actually worry and feel about that particular
if you are breathing at this cosmic rate. Now let’s say
identification. When you pin yourself on anything whatever, then the
eye has teeth, that is it has become a mechanical proposition. Those
are the teeth on the cogwheel. There is the I the observer.

When the observer
conceptualises itself as fitting into the situation just like one
cog, nice piece of cog-work fits into another one so identification
is the ‘observer with tooth’ concept fitting into
something. The id-entification, the entity is made into an it. That
is an object, material like the fact of identification.

Now whatever form the
‘e,’ me, you set up and identify with,

there is a
corresponding ‘u’ or urge level for it,

and therefore a
breathing rate for every idea you have. Now I want you to watch this
very, very carefully in yourselves now and you will discover that
this is true. That every time you change your idea, your breath rate
will change. I will recite the ideas and you will watch the breathing
while you look at the idea.

A green-watered
swimming pool with you floating in it.

A dog biting at your
heels.

An aeroplane gliding
towards an airport.

A sudden explosion when
it hits a pylon.

Notice what happens to
you inside when you change the image?

A
slight contraction in the solar plexus

Every time you change
the image, you change the image equivalent in the urge and it appears
in the breathing manifestation. Now you can see the importance in
breath control. It means that if you want to be imperturbable, if you
want a diamond body, if you want immortality, you must have that
which cannot be changed.

Figure
2

Figure
1

Now all temporal images change and therefore have
corresponding feeling states which we call passions, that is passive,
reactive levels of feeling. But there is one image which we will
represent in that manner, the circle in the cross, and the cross in
the circle and when we get that image, we have got something that
stands, no matter what we think about. Let’s have a look at it.

Watch you breathing
rate when you look at this man and this lady. Look at Figure 2, watch
the processes of association that occur in your mind and as soon as
you become aware of the breath rate that belongs to it, switch your
attention to Figure 1, and watch the difference. Can you state what
it is now?

Deep
and very shallow.

Figure 1 is deep and
Figure 2 is shallow? Now that is because Figure 1 has more
significance than Figure 2, not less. When we particularise we are
apparently putting more in, we are really putting less in. The more
objectified the thing is, the less there is in it. Because we are
finiting the application.

If we say a
horse, it has wider application than if you say a white
horse or a black horse. So if we widen the
application we cut off a qualifier. We take an adjective off horse,
keep the horse and it applies over a bigger area. So there’s a
possibility of a good debate here, does white horse
mean more or less than horse? The Chinese have a nice
bit of scribbling in logic called ‘is a white horse a horse?’.
You’ll find it in the Everyman Chinese Philosophy, worth
reading for a bit of non-Greek logic. Where the concept horse is not
equivalent to the concept White horse because it is horse plus a
limiting factor which is not horse. So if you go on increasing the
qualifiers, supposing you put in white horse, earless, and lame in
one leg and tail cropped. For every qualifier you put on it, it is
coming progressively less horse.

But
more identifiable.

More particularly
identifiable and in the process it’s getting weaker and weaker
and when you contemplate it you will find that your breathing becomes
agitated. So if you start illuminating the parts of an individual man
you find yourself full of likings and dislikings for his particulars
and your breath-rate will become agitated, but if you take the
general concept man, your breathing will become
smoother. So you see the key to the proper rhyhmical breathing that
you want rests in the universal idea. In other words the key to
emotional control is in the presentation of a universal form, and if
there is to be identification at all, with the universal rather than
the particular. It’s in this sort of conflict between
particular and universal that the education of man proceeds in the
mysteries.

The ordinary man who
never went into a mystical initiation, didn’t know what went on
inside but he knew that something went on, because the man who went
into it came out different. The moment he’d been in, and come
out again, the man who’d never been in saw a qualitative
difference in him such that they considered he was elevated. He was a
better man afterwards than he was before. So something went on in the
mysteries to which all the people who stayed outside the mysteries
attest that the man who went in wasn’t so good as the man who
came out from them, and that he had gained a certain control that the
ordinary man had no got, and the control process was, the resultant
of the education in the difference between particulars and
universals.

So you will find Plato
saying, ‘when I refer to beauty I do not refer to the beauty of
‘things’, which is relative and temporal, but I refer to
the absolute beauty of those lines, those surfaces, volumes which
arise from the manipulation of a pair of compasses and rulers. That
he called absolutely beautiful, because its beauty is not dependent
on a particular, whereas relative beauty is dependent
on particulars.

The child may be born
of certain parents and the parents may be very kind and have red
hair. So to the child red hair is beautiful. But it isn’t
absolutely beautiful or it cannot be evaluated so by the fact that it
has been hair on the heads of men and women who have treated the
child kindly, but one that is absolutely beautiful or not is quite
other than the effect on the emotions of the child.

So that the forms
precipitated by geometrical operations are absolutely beautiful,
whereas the so-called beauty of a fashionable girl with a certain
kind of nose or hair length and so on, is relative, temporal and not
worth studying in relation to the mysteries.

Conceptual Tyranny

The mysteries shift you
from the particular beauty of this lady with the knee-length skirt,
to the essential beauty of that circle and the cross in it. The
Absolute, unchangeable beauty. So when you contemplate Figure 1, you
actually find your breath rate is different from when you contemplate
Figure 2 and as we are looking for control, you must use the means to
it. The double sound in the ‘my’ in the mystery the ‘y’
signifies the shape of this, that it is a vertical or horizontal or a
circle, and the ‘u’ the ‘mu’, signifies the
urge that arises in you when you contemplate it.

Notice again that when I draw this vertical, and the
horizontal, and you put your consciousness on it, start at the top of
the vertical and run down, take it off and then put it on this side
of the horizontal going across, see if the periodicity of passing
down the vertical and across the horizontal is identical. Tell me
whether you take the same time to go down the vertical as you do on
the horizontal. … ..

I
find the vertical quicker.

You go down on the
vertical quicker.

Yes

Now, that shows that
you are suffering from a flat earth concept, doesn’t it? A
gravitational concept. Let’s posit the earth at the centre
there, and say, ‘this is a circle arbitrarily in outer space’.
Or if you like it is the orbit of the moon. Now, start from the
bottom and run to the centre. Watch very carefully your feeling and
see if you’re not still imposed on by a flat earth concept. See
if you takes you the same time to run up to that centre as it does
down to it, see if you can’t feel a drag on you when you are
moving up… … … … …

You
can fall down, but you’ve got to climb up.

Now you see, that is
tyranny of a concept. A flat earth concept. It actually causes you
because of that concept to take more energy to climb up there than it
takes to fall down there. That shows that inside your head as a man
you have a concept built on the theory of the flat earth. Which is
practically useful but isn’t true absolutely. So that that
concept, when you try to climb from there to there, pinches the
energy and makes it rotate through that concept first. Whereas when
you start from here, you have another concept called the concept of
gravity and that one hurries the energy flow of the imagery through
it. You see the function of a concept there — it can drag on
your energy, it can delay your reaction, or it can accelerate it.

Now we are full of such
conceptual beings. Those are sub-ents. They actually impose on us
unless we actually break them. Now here is a very good exercise,
deliberately put yourself on the perimeter, and try to rise to that
centre and up there and go to it and see if you can equalise the
times. Let’s try that now for a few seconds. … …
… … …

With
an effort.

With an effort. Right,
now I want you to imagine something totally different. Imagine that
you are placed above this vertically and that all that is below you.
In other words you deliberately imagine that it is in this plane, the
terrestrial plane. And now run in from any side. Can’t you
immediately do it at the same speed? And doesn’t that show to
you that concepts have the power to steal energy from you.

So you see the
necessity of breaking conceptual blocks. They exist in millions of
different ways. Such that inside your head there are all sorts of
little traps so you may have what is called, the best
intention, which you heard about as a child when your
educators told you to be a good boy, and always to have the right
intention. So you have inside there a concept called the best
intention.

When an impulse arises
from the tummy land down below and rises up here, when it goes near
the one called the best intention, that best intention has been put
into you through the ear against colossal resistance originally from
your tummy energy so the amount of energy in the best intention
region is so great that your impulse cannot penetrate it. In other
words it has no effect whatever on your action.

You see the mechanics
of it?

And the measure of the
effort that your educators have used to push that concept into you is
the measure of the difficulty in making it work. You see why the real
secret of education does not consist in hammering goodness into
people? Because if you oppose this tummy urge, down here, with ideas
up here against that tummy urge, you will simply set up a system
there that is exactly as strong as the urge was that it had to
overcome to put it in equilibrium. And therefore no urge from below
will have the power to act on it. It cannot penetrate it, can’t
get though it.

So if ever you want to
be good, I don’t know what for, but if you do,
you will have to penetrate that concept of good or you will have to
so break it down into fundamental truths that you have destroyed its
power by spreading it over the whole system. Only then can you
penetrate it. In other words, really you have to understand the
nature of the concept of the good, before you can operate it. And
until you do the reciting of the word good, and be good and so on,
will have no effect.

So we find a very, very
old Chinese statement saying, ‘man is told, be good, be good,
be good, but nobody manages it — and that was thousands of
years ago. And the Taoists said, ‘therefore do not say be
good, because if you say be good, and you put
the concept in there you have defined be bad.’
And this impulse down here doesn’t like restraint of any kind,
and as the one called good is the one that’s socially
acceptable and means inhibition of the tummy urge, when it climbs up
here, the good one, it cannot penetrate to where it gets its form
from, so it goes into the bad one, which says it can do as it wants.
So that the question of morality and ethics is a fundamentally
mechanical one.

If we now add to this
our statement about breathing, we know that every time we contemplate
a certain idea, our breath rate will start to harmonise with it. When
we identify with it our breath rate will be equivalent to that thing
we will be pinned upon it and our feeling state will be a passion,
that is a passive reaction to the form defined in the idea.

So if we want to
transcend those little concepts in our brains then we have to set up
a bigger one — the terrestrial one, the solar one, the sidereal
one, and so on. And only by setting up this bigger concept can we
control the smaller ones. We have to obey something. That is we
cannot act freely and formally at the same time, because form is
bondage.

So if we want to act
efficiently, formally, we must take a big form bigger than the
particular that we want to work on, and use the big form as a control
concept in order to apply the energy on the little one. If we do the
reverse and take the little concept and try to apply it universally
it will fail immediately.

So suppose we take a
man like Hitler, he took the big concept that the Germanic people had
a separate mythology from the Italian peoples and the other so-called
Christian peoples. And he took the big concept of the Norse myth and
then he applied that to the German people and they were the
recipients of that tradition so the concept was bigger than they
were.

He had a governing
concept to impose upon the German people. First of all he would have
found that the average man knew nothing whatever about German
mythology. So he would have been deprived of that master concept to
begin with. And instead of that he would have had a particular little
party politic view and if he had tried to apply it he would have
failed. So you see when we take the two opposite cases, the little
concept applied to the universal and we know that must fail. And if
we take the universal one and apply it to the particular we know it
must cover it.

When you get home, try
looking through a magazine, at all the different forms that you see
in the advertisements and so on and particularly watch your breath
rate, for every form you look at. Until you become convinced that
there is a real relation between the images you consider, the images
with which you identify, and the urge in you, which manifests in this
breath rate.

The last question here
is about the parts of the moon and the significance.

I’m going to
leave it alone because although the parts of the moon are significant
they are not immediately useful to us — this naming of
different lakes on the moon and so on. I’ll say this; that all
parts of the moon are named as sub-concepts of the meaning of the
word ‘moon’. So if you take moon equals
mind, and then sub-divide the mind into its various departments you
will there find on the lakes and so on of the moon, the different
parts of the psyche. It isn’t worth at the moment going into it
deeply.

There’s another
point here:

Because
of their secrecy in the mysteries and the initiation ceremonies etc.,
is it to be believed that they had any real knowledge which could not
be openly revealed and by real knowledge we mean magical ability
which could be misused.

Secret

Sacred

Sacrum

Yes, secrecy and the initiation. Now you know that the word
‘secret’ and ‘sacred’
are the same word. I’ve got to be very sacred tonight in
discussing this. Because this question says ‘did they have any
knowledge worthy of the name and worth keeping secret which could be
misused.’

Now, let’s look
at it. Here is a word we are all familiar with, secret.
Here is another word, sacred, and we are all familiar
with that. Sacred has an ecclesiastical ring to it, and
secret not. Secret is more like states
and politics. And sacred is like the church. They are
the two names for a reality which lies behind the power of the state
and the power of the church. The secret is sacred
and the sacred is secret. In your
physiological studies you will find another word, sacrum.
All these words are puns on a fundamental euphemism. The centre of
power in the human body is euphemistically referred to in those three
words.

If we put this
three-part man down then he keeps his secrets in his head, he keeps
his sacred in his heart and his sacrum down below. You know that the
nervous distribution of energies down below and that part of the
spine that inserts energies into the sexual department is all closely
connected with significance of that word sacrum.

The sac is exactly the
same sac. And it means a sack, a bag.

This rum here has the
significance of differentiating substance. It has to do with
sexuality, with eggs, with ova and sperms. The sacrum energies are
related to the genetic forces and they are the secret of magic, they
are the secret of will.

You alter the whole
volitional structure of a being if you deprive it of sexuality,
because you have deprived it of a certain kind of form which is a
concept which is physiologically the vehicle of the universal
purpose. The universal purpose has posited form into organisms. That
form is in the sperms, and the ova which have sperms on one side of
their tree. So there is form as packets of power resident in the
sacral regions. The church calls it the red sac.

Now you know the red
dragon of the revelation, the desire nature, the epitum of the
Greeks, and as far as the intellect is concerned, you can see this
same sound shift here, the law sac — the secrets of the law.
Now if you all read Troillus and Cressida act 1 scene 32
about the universal wolf, you will remember that there is only one
absolute power, which appears in individual vehicles on earth and
works through the vehicles according to the responsiveness, the
sensitivity, the organisation of the vehicles. Wherever the vehicle
is more sensitive, the universal force will work through it more
efficiently.

So it is said God is no
respecter of persons, He always prefers the best. And the Tao says
God has no favourites, He prefers the best. You notice that, He has
no favourites, He prefers the best. If he had a favourite it would
not matter if that one was no good, He would still like it, like a
mother likes her favourite child when he may be the worst. God isn’t
like that, spirit isn’t like that. Spirit has no favourites, it
always prefers the best.

So if your vehicle is
any good, spirit will use it. If you work with your ability with your
power and your form to improve your vehicle, you’ll necessarily
make that through which the absolute force will deliberately try to
come, because you are fulfilling its purpose. Because you are perfect
in the instrument that it needs for its expression at the finite end.

All that is contained
in the sacred, secret, sacrum reference.

You see here the sacrum and this word mur here,
the wall of the French, the wall, the law. And the door
joke. Every human being has come through the pelvic door and he has
been inserted through the pelvic door. Every energy that goes into a
finite situation becomes involved, in-willed. After being locked up
for a sufficient length of time it will gain the form through the
rotation within the limitation and will then e-volve. It will Will
out. So the secret of life is in, out, and in that glyph, the sacred
secret of the sacrum is hidden.

Before ejaculation of
power at any level there must be a driving in and then it shoots out.
If I want to hit somebody with my fist very hard, first I must drive
into me a concept that this person needs hitting. Then I must define,
‘he needs hitting’, that’s me, and then I must take
my urge, my mu and I must apply it and make my
out of it. And when I have adequately defined him as worthy of being
socked. And then I exalt my will on it by deliberately driving into
it. ‘He needs it’. This is what they do very often in
businesses when they think about the boss, which precipitates what
they call ‘industrial accidents’ and so on —
getting at the boss. Define him as worthy of retribution, and then
exalt the will by dwelling on it as your grinding away and when
you’ve packed it in out it comes — BANG. And the measure
of that bang is exactly the measure of the clarity of the definition
and the importation of the will into it.

So if we take a man on
a plane and he wishes to change that plane for any other plane, he
defines the plane he is on he is driving it more and more to a
generic concept centre, so he gets the seed and then it shoots. And
then when it’s shot up, it makes another plane. He defines
himself in again to the seed to shoot onto another plane.

That is the way that
the intellectual life has been grown out of the emotional life out of
the urge life. The urge life has pressed in and made for itself a
material body therefore, St Paul says, first a physical body. Then it
packs into that physical body all the experiential energies it can
until it’s so packed that something must happen. What happens
is, it shoots up and polarises as liking and disliking. Then the
likings and dislikings go to a limit, you force them back and if you
consider your likings and dislikings properly and drive yourself onto
them as centres, it floats up into the true rational life. And there
is your three level man. It can float beyond those levels by further
effort, but that is the way they are generated. So our simple little
glyph is the key to transcendence of all planes. That is the meaning
of the mysteries and of the secrets.

We can then answer the
other part of the question ‘were they dangerous?’ Is
there any danger involved and we must say immediately there is a real
danger. You can see why it cannot be opened with ease. If we make the
true statement to people, that in the lower part of their body there
is an energy centre, which, if they contemplate properly, they will
discover the source of life and the power to dominate then their
attentions will go to where they already go. But they will not
concentrate them, they will drift and then all that will happen with
them is an increase in sexual activity. So that the premature release
of information causes a fall of those people deeper. They are not yet
at the level where they have sufficient conceptual opposition to
balance the urge force on the feeling level. They cannot change their
phase unless they can inhibit it.

So if they haven’t
the power to control their reaction to it, they cannot change onto
the higher level. If you tell them pre-maturely, before the law of
substance is in them, they must continuously leak out and degenerate.
So it isn’t a question of keeping power from people, because of
jealousy on the part of the power holders at the top. It’s the
fact that premature revelation causes degeneration. They must abuse
it. All power that you are made aware of for which you have no
correspondent concept to balance it, will leak and you will
degenerate. For which reason, you shouldn’t want to know the
secret behind the secret until you have absorbed the meaning of the
secret you have already got and deliberately applied it on the levels
that you already know about.

Let’s just repeat
a bit about this identification. When you take consciousness, which
is represented by the white paper, and make no mark upon it, there is
no identification. There is no trouble there is nothing posited,
nothing posited to make trouble possible. So if we have pure
consciousness with no object, there is no identification and no
trouble.

Now we know that the
world exists as an objective actuality, and therefore we know that an
object has a function. When the bible says, ‘God so loved the
world’, it means that the world has a function to Absolute
Power, Absolute Intelligence. We have to find out what that real
function is. The Absolute Intelligence has made the world as an
object.

We’ll have to restate the necessity for the object.
Supposing we had the white paper extended infinitely. It is a
potential of knowledge, but not an actuality because there is no
object. So it sets up for itself a sphere. Now all the motions of
spirit outside that sphere which were hazy mazy, hitting on that rim
which is caused by a rotation, react back from the rim. So there is a
modification produced by the object. That’s the first thing. If
we represent this by A here, and the macrocosmic one is the H. That’s
the Aleph and this is the He.

If the Absolute here
hasn’t got a reflexion point to turn back its own motions into
it, it cannot know itself. But if it has a point of reaction it can
know itself and it can know itself in different ways according to the
different character of the objects precipitated. So when it has made
one of those, which is a bol, ball or vol, or universal volition, it
precipitates within itself another one, and then the energy of the
Absolute is hitting back here into the Absolute making the Absolute
conscious of its object, the universal is vibrating, and hitting
inside here. We’ll say this is the sidereal one for the moment.
The sidereal forces in that sphere hit on the solar forces here, and
are reflected back and produce universal consciousness. The solar
energies hit on a planet, say like the earth, and return to the solar
limit, producing solar consciousness.

Now you can see what
happens, we have a gross material body here and we have this solar
field and the sidereal field. If we take our three part man then that
black body there corresponds with your belly land, here is the land
above, and here is the land above that, so that’s three levels.
That which absorbs the material, the tummy land, that where the solar
plexus dominates, and that where the sidereal forces dominate which
produce ideas in the mind. So we need a point of reaction, an object
which can return every kind of frequency we have. So if we want to
understand that we exist physically, we must have a physical object
to hit against to get a reaction. So if I strike against this chair,
that it resists me allows me to know that I have a physical hand. If
the chair suddenly vaporised when I struck at it my hand would go
through the space where the chair had been and I would get no
reaction and I would not know the possibilities of my hand. So in
order to know my physical possibilities I must have a physical body
to push against. Now this has to do with the sacrum joke again,
because this push at the physical end must have an anti-push, whereby
it can become conscious of itself.

In the same way at the
level of liking/disliking, I must find an emotional being, a being to
whom I can emote, and who will respond emotionally otherwise I can
never find out my emotional capacities.

Then at the rational
level I must find a man who has a rational mind such that he can
react at the rational level that I put out, to return the rational
statement to me, otherwise I cannot know my rational capacity. That’s
there levels. There are other levels, but if you don’t find
your reaction points at those levels and exhaust them, you can’t
find the other levels that exist. So you need a physical being for a
physical self-awareness, an emotional being for your emotional
self-awareness, and a rational being for your rational
self-awareness.

And if you don’t
find them you cannot evolve.

That means that a
person who wants to evolve has actually got to go out either
physically or magically. He has got to go out and find for himself
another being that can reciprocate at the physical level, and when
he’s finished with that the emotional level, and when he’s
finished with that the rational level, and when he’s finished
with that co-ordination level, and so on. If you don’t do them
separately you can’t do them altogether. Because you have to
become conscious of the physical, the emotional and the rational
separately before you can co-ordinate them and use them
simultaneously in an act — rational, emotional and physical
simultaneously. For which you need a reciprocating being able to
function at those three levels.

Supposing we take a man
and he is a man interested in physical sense experience only. So he
goes out and he looks for a girl who is at the same level, called an
enthusiastic amateuse. Now he finds her and he gets a physical
satisfaction. And he says, ‘farewell’, and she says,
‘farewell’. They go away and they don’t even
arrange to see each other again because it might not be the same kind
of situation and in such a kind there is no rationality there is
immediacy of energy expenditure and then departure until it builds up
again. Next time it may be in the skating rink, and the time after
that in the plaza, it doesn’t matter at that level.

Supposing after a
certain amount of experience of that kind, he finds a need for an
emotional relation, and he meets the same girl again. And she says,
‘oh don’t be soppy’. She hasn’t got that
which he needs for an emotional reflection. So he has to go away and
find one that can respond emotionally, and when he’s found one
of those, he’s got to find one that can respond rationally as
well. If he doesn’t he’s going to be disappointed because
his evolution is going to be suspended until he finds one.

So you can see that
when we are discussing this sort of thing, that it really is
surcharged with significances that make it potentially dangerous for
an unprepared person, a person that’s done no mental work,
could quite easily be triggered off, stampeded into all sorts of
extrovert behaviour which for them could only spell trouble. Not that
there’s anything immoral or unethical in the kinds of relation
that they might get into, but that they would not be able to pay the
price that they would be required to pay for energy expenditure not
controlled by them.

Remember nothing is
permissible in the evolutionary path except that which is done by act
of will, deliberately. Reaction, mechanical, is not allowed because
you cannot evolve mechanically. You must do everything deliberately,
the physical level, emotional level the rational level all must be
made conscious and deliberate otherwise it doesn’t count for
evolution and for it to be conscious, you must have a conscious
reciprocal point on which to act and which will act back on you.

Now is that clear? Have
we any questions about this relation? It’s all to do with this
breathing, this impulse—expulse of energy, the form onto which
you contract which is an idea, the degree of urge power you put into
the contraction, which is the degree of the expression afterwards.
The linkage of the individual rhythm with solar, sidereal rhythms and
so on. They are all fundamentally tied together so closely that you
cannot legitimately think about one of those problems without being
driven to consider all of them. To consider identification you have
to consider that which identifies and that with which it is
identified — the subject and the object. The subjected pure
world of contracted actuality. So that to try to consider one forces
you to consider all.

I
would like to ask you a question. This ‘awareness with regard
to situations’ for instance. You can decide that you are going
to say something or do something in order to observe your own
reaction on other occasions you can find that suddenly you become
aware yourself of how you have reacted to something that has started.
The one has started off being mechanical and suddenly you have become
aware of it and the other you have entered into it aware of what you
are going to do. Is there any value in the other one where you have
started off mechanically and you have suddenly become aware?

Let’s look at the
two processes a minute. There’s your head, there’s an ear
— one of them will do — drilling a concept into it. We
drill a concept into the ear and it goes up here and it turns round.
Now in a baby there is no concept of reflexive self-consciousness.
When we drill such a concept into the ear of a human being, and the
concept takes up its place in the brain, it is engrammed there, and
says, ‘reflexive self-consciousness’. It is just a form
put in through the ear. It has no immediate relation with the urge
department down here, or the feeling department. When you first say
reflexive self-consciousness to the average man, it
does not produce profound reactions in the sacrum. It doesn’t
produce great effluxes of the emotion. It just goes ‘reflexive
self-consciousness’, and it has no meaning. It’s just a
form. So it’s put inside but then the word reflex is in it,
bending back. That word bending back is
written somewhere is his sexy brain, and gradually the resonances of
this concept go through and they strike on the back-bending concept
over here. Then suddenly he begins to think
reflexive-self-consciousness might be interesting. And he doesn’t
know it but he’s seen a funny image something like this you
see, a back-bending image, simply because of the associations of
reflex.

Now he, at the
fundamental tummy level, then suffers (because he doesn’t do it
deliberately) the resonance relation of the two concepts and
reflexive self-consciousness begins to glow because it offers to the
urge possibilities of fulfilment of back-bending operations. It’s
as simple as that mechanically.

So then incline thine
ear it says, to further information about reflexive
self-consciousness. Now self is a word that we are all
fond of and that’s engrammed over the whole brain. So we like
the self part of it and we like certain interpretations
of the back-bending part of it, and the consciousness, the simple
awareness, is vaguely aware of what it means.

So we have a very vague
one in the consciousness, a very vague resonance —
a sharp one in the self one and one that’s not
seen through in its significances when first inserted, in reflex.
But as these resonances begin to make their connections with other
definitions, conceptual structures in the mind, so the whole process
begins to integrate itself, but initially it integrates itself only
in so far as it appears to subserve the purposes of JT below. That
must be so. Because the sacrum part is down here. The only reason for
inclining thine ear to a secret to the primary urge, is to increase
its actual performance.

So initially all the
ideas that people get about truth and goodness and beauty they are
all interpreted by the tummy department as meaning more of what I
like. That necessarily so. Then as you work on it you become aware of
other planes, because in the process of working upon this the energy
from below, believing this system to offer it fulfilment begins to
pile energy into it and then quite suddenly the pile of energy into
this changes its phase.

When the integration of
the concepts inside the mind imported through the five senses reaches
a certain level, quite suddenly instead of being particular it
becomes universal. And then it is realised that every other being is
evolving in the same way. Then arises the idea that not every other
being will do, because you must have a reciprocal centre in the being
for every centre you wish to develop. That means you need a
three-centre being, a human being, if you want a full human
development. Some fellows have been happy to develop on two levels.
In the middle-east, a lot of them are happy on two levels.

If you want the full
human relationship you will have to find the being with all the
different levels. So when we finds that a declaration has been made,
‘I will be reflexively self-conscious’, it means that the
original concept set up by rattling of the ear has dominated
consciousness for a time. But we know that it has done so originally
because the urge chappie from below thinks that it is a good idea. So
when the idea comes, ‘I will watch and I will be wakeful, and I
will be reflexively self-conscious’ is declared, immediately
this fellow says, ‘most certainly do watch’. And the eyes
start staring out. They stare out into the world. They are watching.
What they are watching for is that which will please the fellow
below. So the next moment the concept has lapsed and you become
unconscious again and you fall into the experience.

And the more involved
you become in the external experience, the more finited your power
becomes until you are driven logically and inevitably to the point
where you fail in the external world. You are then unconscious.

But at the point of
failure there is a little concept to do with failure here that has an
immediate link with the reflexive self-consciousness concept, which
has been defined as the way out of failure. So the moment you have
reached failure level, a certain amount of energy flies into the
failure department and the only connection between the pleasure
department is the one, ‘how to avoid failure’, namely the
master concept of reflexive self consciousness. So out of the depths
of your unconsciousness, you suddenly wake up.

Now the processes are
exactly equal. One is not better than the other, because they are
both mechanical. The one that rattled your eardrum and set the
concept in, that made the declaration. You didn’t make it. It
made itself. Once it was established, and the resonance with the
purposes of the tummy gentleman below (which caused the extroversion,
which causes the lapse of reflexive consciousness), and the final
failure in the external world which triggered off the failure concept
and re-establishes the connection with the reflexion concept —
all are mechanical.

So you have to see that
whole cycle of it and set up another observer outside the physical
body to watch the whole process and it is this one outside the body
that you have to become. You really are that. You become what you
are. You have to continuously re-become that observer and watch these
mechanical processes so when wakefulness occurs you see that is a
stimulus response of a conceptual being and after a time it will
lapse and you are watching it lapse. You actually see this fellow
below saying, ‘jolly good idea that’ sends up a message,
‘the guy is extrovert’ and you are watching. And you keep
watching while they are extroverting. If you don’t interfere
with them and watch them extroverting, initially you just watch them
do it, to become convinced of the mechanics of the process. And you
continuously back-flow to the non-formal consciousness and then when
you’ve seen the whole process and the pure mechanicality of
so-called salvation and perdition, when you see the mechanicalness of
both processes, and you continuously back-flow, you escape from
mechanicality of perdition and salvation.

You see they are
exactly equal and opposite.

That’s the real
saviour, the non-formulated consciousness which you must continuously
re-become, with the formula, ‘the observer is not the
observed’.